Chapter Text
Coraline Jones was restless. She always had been, ever since she was a little girl. Some of her first memories were of bouncing off the walls in her home in Michigan with her mother snapping at her to calm down in the background. She was pretty sure she had some sort of attention disorder with a D in it, but her parents had always brushed her off about it and now she didn’t care enough to make her own appointments to get evaluated.
She’d channeled her restlessness in different ways throughout the years. She found out early on that when she was outside there was plenty of room to roam and no one to judge how she talked to herself or jumped around or made faces at the trees so she’d loved nature since as early as she could remember. She’d tried all sorts of hobbies, dropping and picking them up as soon as she got bored, much to her mother’s aggravation. She’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into her friendships and never cared much for school, and then…The Pink Palace Apartments.
Bored and upset at her life being turned upside down, eleven year old Coaraline had been smarter, more imaginative, and more curious than her parents had wanted to deal with. That’s why the door had fascinated her, why she had gone through it so many times, why the other world with its other mother who didn’t care how loud she was or how many questions she asked, had drawn her in so thoroughly. And then the dissolve, the fraying at the edges, the rot. No one had come to save her. At best the cat had guided her, but in the end it had been her who had played the game, saved the ghost children, crawled through a shuddering tunnel with the screams of whatever that creature had been so loud behind her she’d had to clean blood off her ears in the bathroom later.
She’d been fine for a bit, high off of her success. Wasn’t it every kid's dream to beat the monster under the bed and she’d done it! No one believed her when she told them, but back then she hadn’t needed them to. It was enough for her to know.
But then the cat disappeared. It had probably died as cats were ought to do, even magic cats, but it was like her personal guardian angel had abandoned her and she felt so so alone.
By her twelfth birthday she was paranoid. If there was one nightmare creature there were others, and what if the Other Mother wasn’t really gone? What if her poison coated candyland could regrow itself like a twig snapped off of some twisted tree? Her restlessness returned and she stayed outside when she could. She even slept outside in the summer, in the hollow tree or on the porch if it rained, but when winter came and her parents demanded she sleep indoors she locked her bedroom door tight and slept with a pocket knife she’d bought off of a highschooler under the pillow.
She didn’t sleep well no matter what she did, but she rarely felt lethargic, she just felt more anxious. Her father tried every herb in the book before turning to pharmaceuticals and nothing helped. She tried to tell them but they told her all the things they’d told her before, except this time it was like nails on a chalkboard to her ears.
She didn’t have friends at school or anywhere else. She’d moved here too late to be a part of any of the small town cliques that had been developing since kindergarten, and even if she had been born and raised in that school she marched to the beat of her own drum far too much for her classmates' liking. She cared too much, she was too strange, she always smelled like mud, she asked too many questions. There was always a reason somebody had a problem with her. She’d had Wybie for a bit, but then his grandma had died and he’d moved away. He changed his phone number at some point and Coraline had never heard from him again. Then she was alone.
It was all becoming too much by then. The shadows closed in all around her and at some point she had grasped onto the idea that if she could just leave The Pink Palace Apartments behind and go somewhere where she didn’t have to wonder if the Other Mother was trying to claw her way through the wall then everything would be ok. She begged her parents to move but they dismissed her. When had they ever not?
She’d been fourteen and desperate when she started breaking pipes and shattering windows in an attempt to make them think something was wrong with the place, but they’d caught her and instead decided something must be wrong with her. She’d been forced into all sorts of therapies and anger management classes and of course nothing had worked because whenever anyone asked what was wrong and she told them they just wouldn’t listen.
She was the only one who knew it wasn’t all a fucking dream.
Coraline had been so laser focused on making people believe her, that she hadn’t realized just how worried her parents were getting until she’d found an information packet for an In Patient Program in with her mother’s work papers. Whatever happend she knew it couldn’t be that, so at her next therapy appointment she pretended she’d had a breakthrough. She practiced smiling in the mirror until she could sell it to her parents and pretended she saw how ridiculous she had been being. She started paying attention to school again and she faded into the background of her parent’s lives the way she had before.
Coraline still spent as much time outside as possible. She read almost anything, but she became obsessed with ghost stories and urban legends. Maybe somewhere in dusty books dismissed as academic humbug there would be a way to prove she wasn’t crazy. She learned about mushrooms and trees and took pictures of them with the camera her grandpa got her for her birthday. She bought pills and weed to help her sleep from a girl with tired eyes in the bathroom at school and hid them under the loose floorboard with her knives and holy water. She made friends with the stray cats outside the highschool and somehow muddled her way through until graduation.
Here was where Coraline saw her chance.
The money she hadn’t spent on a peaceful night’s rest she’d saved and Coraline had always been so effortlessly smart her grades were good enough to take her wherever she wanted to go. Her parent’s protested, there was screaming and slammed doors, but Coraline applied to every college she could that was far far away and got a partial scholarship to study botany at the Imperial College in London. Her parents were livid and hurt and refused to take her to the airport the day of her flight, so she called a taxi and got on the plane alone.
London was like nothing she’d ever seen. Corlaine had grown up in nowhere America and the endless crush of people thrilled something primal in her stomach. Far away from The Pink Palace she could finally breathe.
College bored her. She was good at school, but she’d never liked it. The stuffy professors made the living breathing mass of all powerful nature sound so clinical she sometimes wondered if they’d ever actually stepped foot in a forest. She was too restless for homework most nights and found herself wandering campus with one ear bud out and pepper spray in her pocket during the wee hours of the morning. On weekends she took ubers to the famed forests of England and traipsed through them all day until she knew the predators were about to start making their grand appearances. She met a boy in a bar who showed her pictures of decrypted old ruins he shouldn’t have been in that he’d sold for good money and a spark was lit in Coraline’s mind. She did some googling, picked up her camera and broke into an abandoned church during the witching hour. The pictures sold to a trashy tabloid for two hundred dollars and it was the biggest she’d smiled in years looking at the money in her palm. She skipped class to take pictures of train tunnels and castle ruins and ghost hospitals and listened greedily to the eerie stories of the things that had happened there. She found records to confirm existences and bought a lock picking kit a professional would be impressed with.
There was nobody to tell her to stop moving, to stop asking questions, to stop looking into things no one had asked her to. For the first time she was all by herself in a way that suited her perfectly well.
She had friends of course, everybody made friends in college. Jasmine was a girl with pink and blue hair who wrote heart stopping poems, and Anthony a boy with glasses, a wicked smile, and a quote for every occasion. Aspen was from one of her botany classes and the smartest person Coraline had ever met with an extensive collection of sweater vests and Darlene was a theater major born to play the typical popular girl bully in a teen film, but who had a heart of gold off the stage.
They were fine. Coraline wished she had more to say about them. She could see what wonderful, interesting people they were, but all she could think of them was that they were just fine. They were fun to go drinking with and were all London raised and could tell her how to get around, but there was nothing about them that endeared them to her in a more sentimental part of her heart. She wondered if there was something wrong with her, the way she felt disconnected from their laughter and warmth, because why else couldn’t she love them the way people were supposed to love their friends? They did unique things and were so kind but sometimes they just seemed so…young. Coraline felt like she was a million years older than them, watching them bumble through mistakes she’d made and learned from years ago while they expected her to be right on the same page. Their problems seemed so mundane and their worlds sometimes seemed so small they squeezed the breath out of Coraline’s lungs. Some days Coraline felt so disconnected from their idle lives she hopped on a tram, turned off her phone, and rode until she decided to get off and lose herself in the city.
Tonight was not one of those nights though.
Jasmine had pulled the gang together and Darlene had acquired fake IDs so the five of them went drinking in an actually nice wood paneled pub with good quality alcohol instead of downing cheap wine in some rickety senior dorm. The others laughed and joked while Coraline listened and smiled when somebody looked her way. When had she gotten so quiet? She’d been such a noisy child, now it seemed as if she could blend into the woodwork at will.
“Janice Danford says she saw the Ridley Hall ghost,” Anthony was saying as Coraline tuned back in.
Aspen took a swig of their beer and snorted. “Yeah and practically the entire dorm was high on mushrooms that night. My friend Jim says he was hallucinating a moss monster down in the boiler room, so excuse me for being skeptical!”
Coraline downed a shot and not knowing what possessed her said, “I met a monster once.”
The table went quiet and all eyes turned to her, hazed over with the warmth of a little too much alcohol. She wished she’d never said anything as her friends looked at her with a look in their eyes she was all too familiar with from her early middle school days, a look like she was prey.
Coraline laughed as naturally as she could. “It was all a dream of course, it’s just stuck with me for years.”
Her friends relaxed and Darlne smiled easily. “Well you have to tell us now Coraline!”
So she did and as she spoke, sparing no gory detail, she realized this was the first time she’d gotten out the full story since she’d told it to her parents when she was eleven years old. It felt strange to let this thing that had been moldering inside of her, rotting her innocence for years, out into the warm brightness of the pub but it also felt right. She wasn’t trying to convince anyone, she just got to say it.
When she was finished Jasmine whistled. “Damn Coraline! That’s one fucked up dream!”
“It reminds me of some crackpot story my uncle told once,” Aspen volunteered. “Something about a website that filled his house with spiders, and he believed it too! He went to The Magnus Institute with it and everything, but no one in my family believed him cause it was an open secret that he was addicted to painkillers at the time, but you know he went to rehab and we all have a good laugh about it now!”
“Too much information Aspen,” Anthony said dryly and got up to order another round.
“What’s The Magnus Institute?” Coraline asked.
“Oh Christ,” Jasmine wrinkled her nose, “It’s this place in Chelsea that advertises itself as this really legit research center for ‘the paranormal and supernatural’ but in my opinion is a load of dogshit. They do other stuff I think, they’re supposed to have a good library in their defense, but their main shtick is letting anyone come in and give a statement about whatever ghost or monster they thought they saw while they were high and the staff uses it for research and evidence for whatever their doing, I don’t really know. Maybe I’m being too judgemental.”
She waved her hand and took a shot, but Coraline’s brain was clicking. “Anyone?”
“Yeah I think so. Why? Oi, Anthony you’re going to get alcohol poisoning if you drink that!”
Later that night Coraline sat on her bed with a blanket pulled around her ears, staring out the window with glazed eyes. Her roommate snored softly and Coraline considered a joint, but she’d been trying to stop relying on sleep aids since she moved to London and she didn’t want to set back her progress. Instead she opened her computer and pulled up the search bar, typing in The Magnus Institute. She scrolled through the search results. The directions said it was only a few tube stations away. She put her laptop away and flopped over to try and sleep but a slight scratching sound in the walls distracted her. It was just the pipes just the pipes just the pipes but she got up and lit her joint anyway.
She didn’t really think about it the next morning, it just sort of happened. She was on her way to class with eye bags and a coffee in hand since she was still far to American for a morning cup of tea, but her feet carried her past the botany building into the tube station, onto a train and there she was. The Magnus Institute looked small next to the buildings around it, ornate but not in a way any London resident hadn’t seen already. A nondescript bronze plaque by the main entrance announced that the institute had been founded in 1818. Coraline bit her lip and pushed her way into the lobby before she could second guess herself.
It was dark, cramped, and slightly grimy. The lights were an ugly fluorescent hue, but the young woman behind the desk looked pleasant enough. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Rosy and she gave Coraline an encouraging smile.
“What can I do for you dear?” she asked warmly.
Coraline gave her the most genuine smile she could muster. “Hi, um, I guess I heard that this was a place where you, um, I guess could come and tell your story? Like if you saw, like um, a ghost or, or a monster or something?”
Her cheeks must be flaming red, but Rosy, bless her soul, took it in stride. She nodded sagely and asked, “You’re here to give a statement?”
Coraline chewed on her lip nervously. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Down that hall and down the stairs on the left labeled ‘Archives’. You can’t miss it! The Archivist will take your statement shortly. If you like you can fill this out while you wait!”
“Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for your help.”
“No problem dear. Don’t be anxious, alright? No one will judge you here.”
Coraline had heard that before from school counselors and therapists and anger management course instructors who’d wondered why the hell she was there after only one session and all of them had been lying, even when they thought they were telling her the truth, but right now coming from this smiling young woman in this odd dusty building it felt like the truth. Her smile didn’t feel forced as she nodded.
Coraline found the archives with no problem, but they seemed empty. Disorganized shelves stretched on to the back of the room which was shrouded in shadow. A clump of messy desks were grouped together next to a small kitchenette with mugs stacked in the sink and a tea kettle making the high pitched sound of properly heated water. An office door was slightly ajar with a curtain pulled down over the window.
Coraline was slightly unsure what she should do, then remembered the form in her hand she was supposed to fill out, realized she had no pen, and pattered over to the desks to see if there were any she could borrow. There were many of all different varieties, but a file on one of the desks caught her eye as she reached for a pen with a pom-pom on it. It was just a simple manila folder marked Statement #0092302, but a purple heart shaped sticky note attached to the top read simply whose tooth??? in neat script. Coraline glanced around and reached to open the file, but at that moment the office door banged open and she jumped away, heart pounding recklessly.
A man with scraggly brown hair shot with gray and generous shadows under his eyes wearing wire rimmed glasses stood in the doorway, his mouth set in a disapproving line. His pants were wrinkled and his sweater with tacky elbow patches looked far too large for him. Coraline couldn’t help but picture him as one of Anthony’s rumpled literature professors. He would certainly have looked right at home on one of these pretentious British college campuses.
“Martin, if you don’t fix that kettle I’ll-” he broke off when he noticed Coraline. “Ah, Ms. Jones I presume? Rosy told me you were on your way down. Have a seat in the office while I fix that infernal kettle, blast Martin for bringing it in in the first place! I’m Jon, the archivist, by the way.”
He was gone before Coraline could get a word in and she felt an absurd desire to laugh, but bit it back. She made her way into the office which was so cluttered with odd objects, papers, and books, her eyes couldn’t focus on any one thing. She shrugged her jacket off and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. She leaned forward to examine the large old fashioned tape recorder on the desktop just as Jon bustled his way back in looking like a harried chicken.
“Terribly sorry. As I said, my name is Jon and I’ll be taking your statement.”
“Of course,” she said quickly. “Um, what exactly does that mean?”
Jon took a deep breath, as if he was centering himself, and folded his hands together. He didn’t look annoyed exactly, but it also didn’t seem like taking Coraline’s statement was exactly what he wanted to be doing with his afternoon. Coraline leaned back in her chair and folded her hands to mimic him, finding that she really didn’t care if doing his job wasn’t what he wanted to be doing. She was finding that she wasn’t sure this was what she wanted to be doing either, but she was here and she was going to do it and he was going to do his professional duty and help her.
“Well you’ll tell me your story and I’ll record it and if you want to leave your information with us then we’ll contact you once we do any possible follow up research,” Jon explained and Coraline nodded.
“Alright. So, um… I guess when I was a kid my family moved and-”
“Just a moment,” Jon said curtly and flicked a button on the tape recorder. A slight whirring sound filled the small room and something inside of Coraline smoothed over. She couldn’t say why the tape recorder sounded so right to her, but it just did.
“Statement of Coraline Jones,” Jon was saying into the recorder, “Regarding…?”
He looked at her expectantly and Coraline cast around for an answer. How to sum up everything that had kept her awake at night and ruined her life for the past eight years in one sentence?
Finally she settled on, “A door I found in my childhood home.”
“Statement begins,” Jon said, and he nodded at Coraline to start talking.
So she did.